


Just Hold On And Loop It Again

by clotpolesonly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Office, Anxiety, Awkward Kira Yukimura, Competence Kink, Confident Laura Hale, F/F, Phone Calls & Telephones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 22:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16127954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clotpolesonly/pseuds/clotpolesonly
Summary: Kira pushed the button that saidholdand the dial tone came back down the line. She really hoped that was supposed to happen. At least, the number in the bottom corner of the little screen on the fancy desk telephone was flashing, so she was pretty sure the call was still connected.The only problem was that it was flashing the numberfour,because that was how many calls she had put on hold in the last twenty minutes.Because she did not knowhow to get them back.--In which Kira gets roped into phone duty with no training, and Laura comes to her rescue.





	Just Hold On And Loop It Again

**Author's Note:**

> for the last day of LHAW!!! also, yes, this is based heavily on my own experience with spontaneous unprepared phone duty and confusingly complicated telephones. fuck phone duty, _let me enter my data in peace._

“Good afternoon, Hale Financials Incorporated. This is Kira, how may I direct your call?”

The only reason that Kira got the whole spiel right was because it she had it written out on a post-it note and taped to the desk. It wasn’t even _her_ desk, or her post-its, or her phone, or her _job_ to answer said phone. But here she was anyway because apparently the entire department was out of the office for the next few hours.

Three people on vacation, two on sick leave, one with a sick kid, one at a conference, and two with appointments that couldn’t be rescheduled. There was currently one other person on the main floor handling all time-sensitive calls that came in, two bosses upstairs who were not to be disturbed unless it was an emergency, and a whole bunch of voicemails waiting to be filled.

Which was where Kira came in. Even though this was literally not her job.

“Of course,” she said, falsely bright to cover up the fact that her anxiety was currently in overload and she was about to vibrate out of her skin. “I can put you through to a representative in our pre-need department. Do you mind if I put you on hold for a few minutes? Wonderful, thank you for your patience. Please hold.”

She pushed the button that said _hold_ and the dial tone came back down the line. She really hoped that was supposed to happen. At least, the number in the bottom corner of the little screen on the fancy desk telephone was flashing, so she was pretty sure the call was still connected.

The only problem was that it was flashing the number _four,_ because that was how many calls she had put on hold in the last twenty minutes.

Because she did not know how to _get them back._

Kira snatched up the wrinkled sheet of paper that was her lifeline for the day: a set of instructions the usual receptionist had typed up right before she’d rushed out of the office, shoved into Kira’s hands by the office manager on _her_ way out the door with a hurried plea that she man the phones until someone else could make it back to take over.

Kira had found herself spirited out of her tiny backroom cubicle and into the main quad before she could even remind anyone that she had never gotten any training on answering phones. She was a data entry specialist, okay? She typed numbers into spreadsheets all day because that was what she was good at. And because it didn’t require competent human interaction. She never had to worry about accidentally offending a spreadsheet.

Or getting a spreadsheet stuck on hold. Kira would _swear_ that the phone on her desk in her tiny cubicle was not this complicated, but she also wasn’t sure she had ever actually received a call on that phone, which wasn’t all that surprising considering she’d only been working with HFI for a few months. She still barely knew the name of the guy in the cubicle next to hers, much less which voicemail she was supposed to be directing this call to.

 _That_ was theoretically something she knew how to do. There was a _transfer_ button, a list of labeled buttons that lead to different extensions in the office, and a _release_ button that actually put the call through to the selected extension. That much was all on the instruction sheet, as was the process of holding. But for some godforsaken reason, the _release_ button did not seem to apply to calls on hold like it did to transferred calls.

And now there were four probably very important people, sitting in their big offices or their fancy cars, tapping their expensively-shoed toes as they waited impatiently to be connected with whoever it was they wanted to talk to while Kira sat here in a panic, quietly dying inside because she couldn’t even remember who the first three calls _were_ much less who she should be putting them through to, and it didn’t even matter anyway because she didn’t know how!

Judy over in the corner was already buried in work, flipping through transaction reports with one hand and keying in contract information with the other, all while reassuring a concerned customer through her headset. The little flashing light on her desk phone said she had another call waiting. Kira wondered who had put _that_ call through, because it certainly hadn’t been her.

The abrupt ring of the phone startled Kira more than was reasonable, even for someone who hated _all_ phone calls just as a rule. She stared at it in horror and dismay but couldn’t seem to make herself pick up. It would just end in the little flashing number bumping up to five unless the others started hanging up because they’d waited too long, and what if they took their business elsewhere? What if they left the company and HFI lost a bunch of clients just because Kira didn’t know how to work a damn phone?

She snatched the receiver up before she could chicken out.

“Good afternoon, Hale Financials Incorporated,” she read off the post-it. “This is Kira, how many I direct your call?”

The man on the line said something, but he didn’t enunciate very well and Kira could hear her pulse in her ears louder than anything, and she didn’t catch a single word of it. He kept talking, probably describing his problem and who he needed to talk to. She definitely heard the word “transfer” in there somewhere and the flashing number stared up at her accusingly, daring her to _feed it._

“Sir, um. I’m sorry, sir, but could you...repeat that? Please?”

More inarticulate grumbling, and Kira was going to get fired. She was going to get fired from the best job she had ever had because of a phone. This is what she got for ignoring her mother’s phone calls in college, wasn’t it? The gods were punishing her for being a neglectful daughter. This was karma.

“Yes, sir,” she said, because the customer was already right, right? That was just how it worked. Always default to yes. “Of course. I can...put you through to, um. Just a moment, I can, uh…”

She was frantically scanning her instruction sheet one more time in the hope that a new bullet point would’ve magically appeared in the last few seconds to save her when a loud knocking came from directly behind her. Kira almost dropped the phone in her fright and whirled her spinny chair around to see a woman with long dark hair and a well-fitted suit jacket leaning against her borrowed desk.

The woman smiled at her. “Who’ve you got there?”

It took Kira an embarrassingly long minute to process the question, partly due to her general frenzied state and partly due to the fact that the woman was _stunningly pretty_ and Kira was a disaster lesbian by nature.

Then she heard the distant, tinny sound of the man saying something else—probably asking where the hell she had disappeared to in the middle of a sentence—and the embarrassing minute promptly turned into a _mortifying_ one.

“Oh, god, it’s...um…” She had no idea who she had on the line and it had to be painfully obvious.

The woman gave her an indulgent sort of look, biting her lip like she was trying not to laugh, and held out her hand. After only a brief hesitation, Kira handed the receiver over.

“Hey, there,” the woman said. “Laura speaking.” Her smile brightened and she leaned back against the desk, feet kicked out in front of her, easy as anything. “Fred! How’s it going? Kerri doing alright? I heard about her knee surgery.”

Kira slumped back in her chair, just now realizing that her hands were shaky with all the adrenaline surging through her system. She didn’t even have it in her to feel bad that someone else was now doing her—admittedly temporary—job for her because she was incompetent, she was just _that relieved._

“So it’s a problem with the trusting?” Laura was saying, nodding sagely like that made perfect sense to her. “Well, if it’s a type nineteen, it should be trusted at a hundred percent. Eighteen? Seventy percent, then, but you know it’s not guaranteed. Uh huh. You’ll have to talk to Bill about that. He should be back from lunch by now; want me to put you through? Alrighty then, I’ll drop you in his inbox. Don’t be a stranger, Fred.”

Laura leaned all the way across Kira to punch the _transfer, Bill,_ and _release_ buttons, and dropped the receiver back in its cradle. Then she settled against the desk again—much closer than she was before, Kira couldn’t help but notice with wordless internal shriek—and grinned at her.

“First time on phones?”

Kira cringed. “Is it that obvious?” she asked faintly.

Laura nodded toward the telephone and helpfully pointed out, “You’ve got four people on hold at once.”

Kira wondered if she could headdesk hard enough to actually put her head _through_ the desk, and if doing so would cause her enough brain damage to wipe this encounter from her memory altogether or possibly kill her. Dying would be better than having a beautiful, confident, _capable_ woman know how much of a mess she was.

But she couldn’t ruin company property like that, not when she was already messing things up so badly, so she just nodded in shame.

Laura’s grin turned conspiratorial, like she had a secret to tell. “Loop key,” she said sagely.

Kira blinked at her. “Pardon?”

“To get people off hold,” Laura told her. “You push the button that says _loop key._ ”

Kira blinked a few more times. “What does that have to do with hold?”

Laura shrugged. “Hell if I know. But that’s what does it. Trust me, I should know by now. Been here five years. You?”

“Three months,” Kira admitted, then hurriedly added, “Not, like, _here_ here! I swear I haven’t been on phones for three months and don’t know how to work the phone! I’m just filling in.”

Laura gave her a once over. “You’re IT department, aren’t you?” she said. “You’ve got that ‘oh god, please don’t make me talk to people’ look on your face.”

Kira flushed. “I type things.”

 _Wow,_ that was lame.

Laura laughed. “And I bet you do it very well or else you wouldn’t be on staff. We don’t hire people who aren’t good at what they do.”

“I guess I—” Wait a minute. “ _We?_ ”

Shrugging, Laura tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. She held out a hand to Kira like she wanted to shake and said, “Laura Hale, at your service.”

“You’re a boss.” Kira felt a little faint, and not just because she was making an idiot of herself in front of someone really important. Laura’s hand was really warm and soft.

“Nah,” Laura said, curls bouncing as she laughed. “Just the boss’s daughter. Don’t worry, I don’t sign any checks. Believe it or not, I do a lot of typing too. Mostly, though, I answer phones. So let’s see if I can’t clear this up for you.”

The loop key did, in fact, bring the long-lost calls back from the beyond. Laura was friendly and knowledgeable about company policy and had each caller properly soothed and appropriately dispatched in under ten minutes, and Kira could practically _feel_ her ill-advised crush developing. She had always had a competency kink a mile wide, though usually it took more than pushing a few buttons to trigger it. These buttons were just counter-intuitive enough to warrant being impressed.

Laura finished the last call and hung up the phone with a flourish as if to say, “ _Ta-da!_ ”

“Now that that’s done,” she said, “how about some lunch? I was just on my way out to Ruby’s Diner across the street. I could pass on all my phone-related wisdom over burgers and a milkshake.”

Kira’s already overloaded brain stalled out; that sounded like a date. Or at least a date-like sort of thing. Not that the boss’s disgustingly beautiful daughter would ever just swoop in, save her from her own inexperience, and then ask her out. That was just ridiculous and things like that didn’t happen to Kira. Laura was probably just being nice, or taking pity on her, or luring her away from the phone so she couldn’t cause another five-caller pile-up.

“I’m supposed to be on duty here until three,” Kira stammered, her desperate desire to escape said duty warring with her desire to not subject herself to a pity-laden pseudo-date with the most gorgeous woman she had ever seen.

A gorgeous woman whose smiled dimmed an obvious amount. “Oh. Yeah, you’re busy, of course. That’s okay.”

She laughed a little bit, looking for a moment almost as awkward as Kira felt. The hair she had tucked behind her ear earlier fell out of place, dropping across her face, and she pushed it aside again with a huff. Kira had the sudden urge to brush it back herself, to see if it was as soft as it looked. It probably smelled good.

The phone rang. Kira cursed it as thoroughly as she knew how.

“Oh! Duty _calls,_ ” Laura said, raising her eyebrows to make sure Kira got the pun. Damn it, Kira loved puns, even if she was usually a little slow on the uptake with wordplay.

Kira fumbled with the receiver, having a hard time drawing her eyes away from Laura.

“Good afternoon, Hale Financials Incorporated. This is Kira, how may I direct your call?” The caller started to say something, but Kira didn’t really hear because Laura was backing away, giving a little half-wave like she was reluctant to leave. Like she didn’t actually want to but didn’t have any reason to stay either. “Ma’am, could I put you on hold for just one second? Thank you for your patience.”

Kira pressed the _hold_ button without waiting for confirmation because she was almost sure now that Laura was really disappointed about the lunch thing. As she’d hoped, Laura paused in her retreat, biting her lip.

“Rain check?” Kira asked, breathless.

Laura’s smile made a comeback. “Or I could bring you something back,” she offered. “Ruby’s has the best fries in the county, and their strawberry milkshakes are to die for.”

“I like strawberry.”

“Great! So I’ll, um. I’ll be back in a few then.” Laura pointed to the phone. “You got things under control here?”

“Loop key,” Kira said with as much confidence as she could muster up, which was considerably more now that her heart was fluttering around in her throat instead of sunk low in her stomach. “Got it.”

Laura nodded and headed off down the hallway, glancing back over her shoulder twice before she reached the lobby. Kira had to pinch herself to make sure she hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing. With a stinging arm and a possibly-date-related milkshake on the way, Kira turned resolutely back to the phone.

With a deep breath, she pushed _loop._

“Thank you for your patience. How may I direct your call?”


End file.
